“Ancient Elixir” is a supplement company selling oils and tinctures, focused on “health, happiness and wellbeing”. Founded in 2011, the owner developed the company as a way of passionate about sharing the experience of tonic herbs with his friends. The company is dedicated to health, happiness and well-being through the use of medicinal plants, superfoods and tonic herbs.
Challenge
Ancient Elixir had a very strong ecommerce business, but no email marketing program, and wasn’t actively collecting emails. They needed a way to bring customers back to their website to finish their purchase. With a relatively small team, the marketing director didn’t have the time and skill to work on email / lifecycle marketing full time, and couldn’t easily stay up to date with new ecommerce technology. Finally, the company wanted to grow sales without having to spend aggressively on digital ads.
Solution
Ryzeo studied the business, and implemented its proprietary high-performing email automation system, consisting of 5 different workflows for different stages in the buyer funnel, including product/browse abandonment, welcome flow, and cart abandonment. They then customized the copy to Ancient Elixir’s brand and style, and created branded email templates. The system performed well, achieving a 99% delivery rate, 60% open rate, 5% click rate, and a 10% conversion rate within 30 days of customer opening an email. More importantly, it brought customers back to Ancient Elixir’s site, and increased total revenues substantially.
Results:
Ancient Elixir added over $100k in new sales per year.
Grew email revenue from 0% to over 40% of sales.
Grew their email list to nearly 100k email addresses.
“Happy Chocolate” is a specialty food company making dairy-free, gluten-free and nut-free chocolate.
Challenge
Happy had a very strong ecommerce business, but no email marketing program, and wasn’t actively collecting emails.
Solution
Ryzeo studied the business, and created a complete email capture & email automation system for them, consisting of 5 different workflows for different points in the buying process.
Results:
Happy added over $300k in new sales per year.
Grew email revenue from 0% to over 15% of sales.
Grew their email list to over 100k email addresses.
At Ryzeo, we are not just a provider but a trusted partner who cares about delivering measurable results. We know email marketing. We have been providing practical, results-driven solutions for over a decade. We’re specialists with extensive email and behavioral marketing expertise. Our software has AI-driven product recommendations that can be added to every email workflow and campaign and your e-commerce website to improve conversion rate and grow sales.
We are super excited to share with you a new milestone the team at Ryzeo achieved. According to Clutch’s Leaders Awards listing, we are considered one of the leading B2B companies, naming Ryzeo a leader in San Francisco’s email marketing space.
For context, Clutch is a B2B ratings and reviews platform based in Washington, DC. They evaluate technology service and solutions companies based on the quality of work, thought leadership, and client reviews.
To be eligible for a Clutch Leader Award, companies must exhibit an unusually high ability to deliver top-tier work to their clients. Receiving this award is no small feat, and we appreciate this recognition.
“We are super excited to have won this award from Clutch. At Ryzeo, we have a strong focus on customer service and making our customers successful.” – Russell Miller, COO, Ryzeo
The team at Ryzeo is grateful to our clients for the opportunities to work with them. We would not be here without them. We are incredibly thankful to those who took the time to leave us a review on our Clutch profile. Here’s what they had to say about working with us.
“We really enjoy working with smaller companies like ourselves. It always feels more personal, friendly and less corporate. That is something we really value as a business, and Ryzeo embodies all of those qualities.” – Matthew Mentley, Marketing Director, WingStuff.com
Find out how we can help you bring visitors back to your website. Contact us now!
Jo is a marketing director for a $5m/year ecommerce fashion brand. She is in charge of email marketing, as well as art direction, website copy, influencer marketing, facebook/instagram marketing, and many other tasks. In a week, she is lucky to have 30 minutes to get the latest batch of emails ready to go out to their customer base. Most of that time is spent on deciding which items to feature, what photography to use, and what to say about them.
Jo knows that email is important to engage her customers at the right time and with the right products. She uses a popular email automation system, and has spent time looking at their guides on creating segments. However, the segments they recommend are very generic, and don’t give her guidance on what kinds of campaigns to create, or strategies that are specific to her business. And when she looks at the options she has to create customer segments, she sometimes feels overwhelmed:
Finding these options too daunting, and having too many other demands on her time, she falls back on a few core segments: Entire List, New Customers, Previous Purchasers and Birthdays.
While she knows how to use the tool, and how to create many more segments, she’s not exactly sure which ones to create, and how to communicate with them. She would like a straightforward list of which segments she should build, and a cookbook of how to message them, whether that’s a campaign or an automation. And in an ideal world, she would like someone to present these strategies to her, so that she could concentrate more on the best products to promote to each service, with the best copy and photography, and less on trying to figure out the best way to segment her database.
As a result, she and her assistant put out a weekly email with a few new products, and send that email to the entire list. Despite having a list of over 200k emails, they only get about 12% of their revenue from email. Jo knows this could be (much) higher, but she doesn’t have the time and knowledge for what changes to make to increase sales.
Does this story sound familiar to you?
Ecommerce Marketing Automation is an Aircraft Cockpit
Ecommerce Marketing Automation is an Aircraft Cockpit. It’s a dizzying array of switches and levers that needs to be operated exactly right to get results, but most of us marketers only know how to use a basic steering wheel and shifter. Thus, not wanting to break anything, we tend to stick with what we know, and just use a few safe tools.
The people who build marketing automation systems wanted to give their customers as many options and capabilities as possible. And so, the modern ecommerce marketer can segment by recency, purchase volume, product type, LTV, geography, and many, many other permutations. Additionally, it’s possible to build out complex workflows that include different channels (Facebook ads, emails, SMS etc), a/b tests, and attribution tags. They proudly point out how easy it is to create very segments and workflows like these:
But how realistic is it to expect their audience to master all of the options they have available?
While it’s a noble impulse on the part of the software company to create all of these power tools, the array of choices creates further load on already overburdened marketers.
Most marketers instead seek a “good enough” outcome that can be defended to their bosses. So they do a bi-weekly or monthly blast, and occasionally segment when a new product comes out. The ultimate result is that all of the effort put into building these really exceptional features is ultimately wasted, as it’s not used except by all but a few power users.
The way the marketing automation companies respond is by saying, “Hey, we can help you become an airline pilot!” But maybe that misses the point. Most marketers do other work besides email marketing.
Most marketers need to focus on staying up to date on everything in their business domain, not becoming experts in email marketing automation.
What would your 14-year old self think of you if you’d followed your passion for decades after to establish a premiere e-commerce website?
That’s exactly what Founder and CEO Rick Arnoldo achieved with Wingstuff. Wingstuff provides Honda Goldwing products and services. The company has a long and rich history based on Rick’s passion for Goldwing motorcycles, a passion his staff and the community of tens of thousands he serves also share.
Ryzeo talked with Rick and Wingstuff Marketing Director Matthew Mentley about the business to find out their secrets to success as an e-commerce company. Ryzeo specializes in website and email automation solutions for ecommerce sites.
Here, Rick shares some tips for e-commerce success and how Wingstuff’s partnership with Ryzeo has boosted its success and outreach even further than before.
The Legend
Rick established Wingstuff in 1999, long before ecommerce had entered mainstream vocabulary. His vision was to serve the community of enthusiasts who were fans of the Honda Goldwing motorcycle. Actually, when Rick was 14-years old, he knew where his heart was: to serve and connect with people who loved Honda motorcycles as much as he did.
The first motorcycle he bought was a Honda XR 75, with a little help from his Uncle Frank. Rick said, “Uncle Frank put a deposit on that bike and we went back to my house and he told my mom about the bike. And when he did the first thing that she did was she was gonna let him have it!
“Uncle Frank said, ‘ Let him have the bike. All his friends have the bike. You don’t want him to have the bike? Just let him have a bike. And my mom just got quiet and never said another word. It was over.'”
He invested in his first Honda Goldwing when he was 19-years old. Working his way through every aspect of Sales and Service at Honda motorcycle dealerships on both the East and the West coast, Rick could no longer tame his overwhelming desire to become a Goldwing entrepreneur himself. Having moved from Rhode Island to California, he wanted to share the wealth with other fans of the motorcycle around the world.
An Ecommerce Pioneer
From the beginning of his entrepreneurial career, he knew he was going to sell his products online. He hired a young programmer. Rick said, “The guy was fresh out of college to be honest, a young guy, and he was so good at what he did and I told him my vision.” But Rick’s vision back then didn’t just stop at selling products online. He wanted to build and connect a global community through the Internet.
Ryzeo & Miva Give a Hero a Hand
The team at Ryzeo helped Wingstuff take its community-building to a new level back in 2018. Wingstuff was about to launch a major redesign and upgrade to its website to Miva. According to Matt Mentley: “Miva has been a great partner with WingStuff since day one. Not only do they make a great software, but the people that work there have all been awesome. They understood what we were trying to accomplish and helped us find our way. The back end is easy to use and we have been able to customize many things that make sense for our business.”
Wingstuff also knew there was a better way to do its email campaigns. They had found their mailings constantly blocked and not getting through to members. Their email server was also getting blacklisted. Not only did Wingstuff find that it was able to help them send emails from clean lists, but Wingstuff found it had discovered a partner in Ryzeo that understood Wingstuff.
“First of all, you were a partner with the platform that we use,” Rick told Russell Miller, General Manager of Ryzeo. “It made it easier and we also liked the personal feeling that you guys gave us. We felt like you did have passion.”
Rick continued, “We felt like you guys could share our passion and dial in and focus and be on point with what we’re trying to achieve, instead of having to remind you of what we’re trying to do.”
Matt, the Marketing Director at Wingstuff, added, “Before working with Ryzeo, we were never doing any sort of welcome series emails, no cart abandonment stuff, post purchase. We wanted someone that was going to be a partner and help us with this launch of the new website.And it was great from the beginning.
“Ryzeo has been on board with us since then and they helped us go through that whole process of onboarding and developing all those emails, getting all the stuff going and those things have been great. Those features we never had for almost 20 years in the company.
“Now we can give the customer a more personalized experience. Even if we’re sending him a greeting email or we’re sending him an abandoned cart email. It’s all about a personalized experience..
“We can ask, ‘do you still need this’?” Matt explained, “Is this something that you’re still interested in?
“We can suggest something else a lot of times or ask, ‘Would you prefer this?’ It’s not robotic, that vending machine feeling. It all flows from everything that we’re trying to accomplish with our mouth, our hands, our eyes,” Matt said.
Wingstuff Tips for Being a Hero
Wingstuff shared its top three tips for becoming a premiere ecommerce vendor:
Have a Passion for Helping Others
Build a Community and Staff of Like-Minded People
Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes
Have a Passion for Helping Others
Rick insisted, “I have a true passion for what we do as a business, which has made a big difference in being effective in helping people. Notice I say helping people, not selling things. Helping people.
“And by helping people we sell things. So I’ve been able to take care of people and create a community of people that love this Honda Goldwing motorcycle that we specialize in and that we love ourselves.
Build a Community and Staff of Like-Minded People
Rick was adamant about his passion for the Goldwing community. “We’ve been able to reach people all over the world through the web. There’s our online presence both in selling products, but also community videos engaging them on social media. We help and support their demographic in terms of teaching them how to do maintenance — Do It Yourself maintenance, to be exact. The Wingstuff Dashboard enabled enthusiasts to find and contact like-minded members and to communicate with them through a centralized messenger service. Members could feel safe that Wingstuff did not expose private data, and that the people with whom Goldwing fans were chatting were into the same things as whoever had started the conversation.
In addition, members can upload photos of their bikes and accessories onto the website to share with the community. Sharing what they love has proven a key growth and retention driver for the community.
Rick added, “We have a video series where I show people how to change your oil and so on. We love what we do. And we love helping people.
“And it’s not all about me,” Rick said. “It’s about our team. It’s about Matt, and it’s about everybody else. We have a whole team of people here that are important at Wingstuff. And I have to think that we all love what we do and that’s the kind of vibe and community that we have internally here at Wingstuff.”
Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes
And Matt, the Marketing Director, added the final tip, “Don’t be afraid to fail, because we failed a lot in the last handful of years. And we tried different things, right? … But you have to try those things to learn.”
